Father and Son in Christianity and Confucianism

Aristotle, in the first book of the Politics, briefly discusses the relation between the family and religious symbolism. He says that the earliest form of social organization is the family, that the earliest form of political organization is simply an extension of the family in which the patriarch of an extended family is king, and finally that men speak of Zeus being the father of gods and men or of the gods having a king on the analogy of their own way of life.1 Though noting that, “He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin, whether a state or anything else, will obtain the clearest view of them,”2 Aristotle apparently considers this peculiar relation between the family and the early modes of organization of gods and men as sufficiently obvious to warrant no great amount of time being spent on its explanation. It must be admitted that Aristotle's insight provides a fundamental reference point for us even today and that in fact the analysis of the problem has not gone as much beyond Aristotle as might be imagined. However, our evident advantage over Aristotle in the systematic understanding of human behavior and in the amount of comparative data available to us should allow us to push the analysis considerably farther. This essay is intended as a brief reconnaissance in that direction.

Aristotle's notion that men think of the gods on the analogy of their own way of life is perhaps close to what some modern psychiatrists mean when they speak of religion as a projection. Freud very significantly contributed to our understanding of the relation between the family and religious symbolism when he traced the